From Pine View Farm

“I’m Not Racist, but . . . .” Reprise (Updated) (Updated Again) (Yawn. Yet Another Update) 3

Chauncey Devega points out that the image of racists as mouth-breathing sheet-wearning terrorists burning crosses is not only inaccurate, but also a misdirection play distracting from more subtle and insidious “polite” racists.

A nugget:

White supremacy is so much more complex and nuanced than such ironically comforting images. The latter does the practical work of colorblind racism in the post civil rights era by framing white supremacy as something absurd, anachronistic, and an outlier. This is a wonderfully comforting thought for white folks and others. An acceptance of the fact that white supremacy is quotidian, common, and manifests itself in America’s social and political institutions, collective psyche, and a deep sense of white entitlement and white privilege, is verboten for a country which wants to embrace a public narrative of racial progress while denying how far it has yet to go.

In all, for post civil rights America, the “nice” and “polite” racists are a much greater threat, in mass, than the “mean” and “vicious” ones.

I’m a southern boy; I grew up white under Jim Crow.

Some of the nicest, most courteous people I knew as I grew up were as racist as racist could be. They would have never said the n-word in public, maybe not even in private, and certainly not within hearing of a Not White person, but they were certain that the color of their skins made them superior to anyone of a deeper hue and that they were therefore entitled to deference.

The sense of entitlement to–the demand for–deference solely because of skin color is an essential element of racism.

Receiving that deference, including deference to claims of “I’m not racist” in defense of clearly racist actions and statements, is white privilege writ large.

Do read the rest.

Addendum:

And, in more news of the not racist . . .

Addendum-Dee-Dum-Dum:

In reference to the Addendum above . . . .

Addendum-Dee-Doo-Dah

Chauncey Devega points out that it was her own damned fault for being.

You know, if you will admit it, that he is correct.

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3 comments

  1. George Smith

    November 15, 2013 at 6:00 pm

    As a side note, there are a whole bunch — and I do mean a whole bunch — of university sociology, history and psyche departments now having students, professors and post-docs doing research surveys aimed at plumbing the nuances of the inner bigot on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You get paid fifty cents, usually, sometimes a whole dollar, to take part in them. Is it serious work? Or the equivalent of a fad? Having experience, I lean toward the latter because while many people probably take and answer the surveys with the utmost sincerity one has to recognize that using a pool of desperate crowdsourced micro-wage workers (some of whom may not even be American) may not be the best place to get brutally honest research. 

     
  2. Frank

    November 15, 2013 at 10:35 pm

    I am curious.

     

    Link?

     
  3. George Smith

    November 16, 2013 at 3:15 am

    I haven’t written about it yet. Trust me, a noticeable number of surveys — and I’ve taken about a dozen of them in the last month — are all aimed at determining the percentage of inner bigot. You can make of that what you want but some of that also ask to measure how warmly or coldly one feels toward the Republican party, the Democratic party, and -the Tea Party.- To be honest, I think they’re mapping behind the zeitgeist, most now know the public bigot when seen because being a public bigot has been remapped as acceptable in the age of Obama and that’s a thing the surveys are not finely developed enough to measure. What is more interesting is how trivial the data collection is, in that it is now common and that they are plumbing a micro-wage labor force for dimes to get results. Good or bad? I have an opinion and you know what it is. We’re well beyond the state where tenured professors paid six figures a year, and students of the privileged,  can uee a desperation crowdsource labor force and make a cogent argument that there are no qualifiers or that they are not in uncharted squishy territory where taking advantage of people becomes as important a consideration as the data. I would be more impressed by the scientific curiosity if they didn’t so depend on one platform — Qualtrics surveys and obviously canned surveys designed for mass use — for data collection, for fifty cents. There is a large piece in this but, of course, no one would publish it because nobody wants the observations of those who work for fractions of a minimum wage because they have no other options.